Sofia Petrovna

But, Mama, would it really be fair for Degtyarenko and his children to live in a basement? Would it!”

The policeman Degtyarenko’s family is one of those the state moved into Sofia’s apartment. The difference in opinion between Kolya and Sofia on communal living is generational: Kolya is too young to remember what it was like having a bigger apartment, whereas Sofia’s memory makes her resentful of having to cede what was formerly hers. This exchange also demonstrates how easily Sofia’s opinion is swayed: After Kolya says this she immediately admits that it wouldn’t be fair.

“Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the Party and the Komsomol.”

Kolya’s callous response to the injustice of Natasha being denied membership to the Komsomol demonstrates just how dogmatic of a Stalinist he is. His letter is a mishmash of standard party lines, from his mention of the necessity of political vigilance to his talk of the omnipresent danger of fascist saboteurs. His argument that injustice is a class concept—absurd in its own right—becomes particularly ironic after he himself suffers injustice at the hands of the state. Screeds such as this one make his arrest appear all the more hypocritical and arbitrary: If someone like Kolya can be arrested, then anyone can.

“As she fell asleep, Sofia Petrovna tried to picture to herself the girl Kolya would fall in love with and make his wife: tall, fresh, rosy, with bright eyes and light hair—very like an English post­ card, only with a ‘KIM’ [Communist Youth International] badge on her breast. Nata?: no, better Svetlana.”

In her fantasy of Kolya’s future wife, Sofia shows how conventional she is. The woman she pictures seems pulled from a propaganda poster depicting a paragon of Russian beauty and patriotism. It’s important to Sofia that Kolya marries someone she likes. In her break from reality at the end of the novella Sofia imagines that Kolya has married this ideal woman—a tragic end to her hopes for her son’s future.

“Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood.”

Sofia and Natasha put this message in every bag of candy for the children at the office New Year’s party. This shows one of the ways in which Stalin was deified in everyday life, even in the lives of children. Thanking Stalin on behalf of these children is particularly ironic given their ages—all they’ve known is the famine that ravaged the country in the early 1930s. This cruel manipulation of forcing the children to thank Stalin primes them for a life of Doublethink: The State Versus the Individual.

“All right, but what about the doctors? What were they guilty of?”

Sofia’s question encapsulates the doubts that the state constantly needed to defuse with propaganda. With no official explanation for why a group of doctors was arrested in connection to Kirov’s assassination a year prior, Sofia doesn’t know what to think. Like an obedient citizen, she waits for the official line. This will be her response to news of injustice throughout the novella.

“And really, why are you so upset? Since Ivan Ignatyich isn’t guilty—then everything will be all right. Nothing can happen to an honest man in our country.”

While Sofia’s faith in Stalinism is somewhat a product of naivete, it can also have a biting edge to it. Her callous response to Mrs. Kiparisova’s suffering combined with her declaration that the state is infallible only adds insult to injury: Mrs. Kiparisova has to listen to Sofia, a family friend, admonish her for being dramatic about her husband’s arrest.

“They all looked perfectly ordi­nary, like those on a streetcar or in a store. Except they all looked tired and baggy-eyed. ‘I can imagine how awful it must be for a mother to learn that her son is a saboteur,’ thought Sofia Petrovna.”

Many of the scenes of Sofia waiting in line at the prison with other women are rich in dramatic irony. Sofia thinks that the relatives of criminals should look evil, not ordinary; she can only think in the simplistic terms of good/bad, hero/villain perpetuated by the state.

“There was only one thing she did not learn in these two weeks: Why had Kolya been arrested? Who was going to try him, and when? What was he accused of? And when would this stupid misunderstanding finally come to an end so he could return home?”

While Sofia learns the intricacies of the labyrinthine bureaucracy surrounding imprisonment, she doesn’t learn what she’s actually trying to find out. These questions dog her throughout the story, as time and time again she runs up against the information firewall maintained by the NKVD. Her stray word of frustration—“stupid”—reveals for a second the indignation repressed beneath her faith in the state.

“Yes, of course, of course, Kolya was not capable of doing anything wrong. She, Sofia Petrovna, should certainly know what a heart of gold he had, and what a brain, and how absolutely loyal he was to the Soviet regime and the party. But, at the same time, nothing happens without a reason. Kolya was still young, he’d never lived on his own. He must have put someone’s back up. You have to know how to get along with people.”

No passage better encapsulates the wrenching cognitive dissonance Sofia suffers after Kolya’s arrest than this one. She struggles to reconcile her two fundamentally irreconcilable beliefs—that Kolya is incapable of doing wrong, and that “nothing happens without a reason” in the just, logical USSR. In this battle between the individual and the state, the state wins. This passage shows the extent to which Sofia is brainwashed: It’s more explicable to her that Kolya made a criminal mistake than that the state did.

“There, in prison, are they all as guilty as Kolya? All those mothers standing in line somehow look an awful lot like Sofia Petrovna.”

Unlike Sofia, Alik is somewhat freethinking. His observation marks the beginning of his private criticism of the arrests. While Sofia holds herself aloof from the other mothers, Alik sees that their sons are as innocent as Kolya.

“No, Sofia Petrovna had been quite right to keep aloof from her neighbors in the lines. She was sorry for them, of course, as human beings, sorry especially for the children; but still an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers.”

This mix of pity and righteousness defines Sofia’s dominant attitude toward “saboteurs” and their relatives. The newspaper articles about the trials of these saboteurs dispel her nascent suspicion that her neighbors in the lines are no different from her. Here, Stalin’s propaganda hand intervenes to keep Sofia supportive of the nationwide campaign against anti-Soviet saboteurs, making her as indignant as the prosecutor about the supposed crimes of these people and thus isolating her from those who share her plight.

“Rat or Ret—it’s all the same.”

Naive as she is to the reality of life in a dictatorship, Sofia believes that the truth of what Natasha typed matters. Timofeyev corrects her, stating in bare terms that he, the representative of the state, decides what’s true and what’s false. Erna’s accusation of anti-Bolshevism against Natasha is valid because Timofeyev has the power to say that it is, not because it actually is.

“‘So she thinks he’s some kind of innocent lamb,’ the nurse began again. ‘Excuse me, please, but people don’t get locked up for nothing in our country. Enough of this. They haven’t locked me up, have they? And why not? Because I’m an honest woman, a real Soviet citizen.’”

Just like Sofia has argued that innocent people aren’t arrested, the nurse makes the same argument against Kolya. To the nurse, Kolya is just another person; the only reason Sofia believes he’s innocent is because he’s her son. Although Sofia hates the nurse and thinks she’s nothing like her, they are cut from the same cloth. This isn’t just a malicious personality—it’s adherence to the party line. After the nurse buys Sofia’s lie that Kolya has been released, she changes her tune, becoming friendly with Sofia again. This isn’t because she’s disloyal but because—whether she acknowledges it or not—there’s safety in supporting the official account of events.

“Believe me, this business with Kolya is a nightmare to me. I’m his mother. But I understand it’s a temporary misunderstanding, exaggerations, disagreement…One has to be patient. But you start right away: scoundrels! swine! Remember what Kolya always said—we’ve still a lot that’s not worked out yet, a lot of red tape.”

It’s particularly ironic that Sofia quotes Kolya on the importance of enduring the growing pains of the Soviet project when discussing his imprisonment. Always quick to defend Stalinism, here we see the consequences of Kolya’s faith: He has become a victim of the very ideology he espoused.

“‘Ha-ha-ha!’ laughed the director’s wife, carefully enunciat­ing each syllable. ‘Ha-ha-ha! By mistake!’ and suddenly tears poured from her eyes. ‘Here, you know, everything’s by mistake.’”

Mrs. Zakharovna’s epigrammatic line “Here, you know, everything’s by mistake” could be the unofficial slogan of the Great Terror. She can only laugh at Sofia’s absurd belief that Kolya’s case is different from everyone else’s. Under such a purposefully deceitful regime, things happen for no reason all the time, and for those who recognize this senselessness, there is sometimes nothing to do but laugh in despair.

“How many nights had it been now since Kolya’s arrest—endless, interminable? She already knew it all by heart: the summertime shuffling of feet under the window, the shouts from the beer hall next door, the rumble of the streetcar, dying out—then a short silence, a short period of darkness—and again a pale dawn filtering in the window, another new day beginning, another day without Kolya […] Where was Kolya now, what was he sleeping on, how was he, who was he with?”

This description of Sofia’s first summer without Kolya captures the feeling of being stuck in an interminable cycle of identical days spent waiting. The sounds of these days—the shuffling, the shouts, the rumbling—are completely banal; without Kolya, Sofia’s life is meaningless. His absence, and the uncertainty surrounding it, keep her in limbo, unable to grieve or move on.

“You can trip a person up, confuse him, I understand that, but only in small things. How could Kolya have been brought to the point of confessing to a crime he never committed? No matter what you say, I simply can’t understand that. And why do they all confess? All the wives are told their husbands confessed…Were they all tripped up?”

Despite her love for Kolya, Natasha can’t see how he could’ve been “tricked” into giving an entire confession. The implication is that he must have done something wrong. Natasha’s doubts represent the doubts of the populace at large, doubts that stem from their ignorance of the NKVD’s use of torture to obtain false confessions.

“‘Soon they’ll take over the whole car!’ cried an old woman with a walking-stick. ‘They get to ride to and fro! In our day, we had to lug our children around in our arms. Carry it a while, won’t kill you!’”

This bitter woman on the trolley is angry that there are special seats reserved for pregnant women, a reference to Stalin’s pronatalist campaign. Her lament echoes Marya’s that Zakharov’s secretary Grigorieva got to ride up and down the elevator whenever she wanted. This outrage over an imagined sense of entitlement is the product of a resentful person who wants everyone to suffer as much as they did.

“‘I can’t stand it any more,’ she cried out loud. ‘I can’t stand it any more.’ And then all over again syllable by syllable in a shrill voice, not holding back at all: ‘I can-not, can-not stand it an-y-more.’”

After months of maintaining an equanimous facade and juggling her paradoxical beliefs in Kolya and the government, Sofia breaks down. In this cri de couer she expresses all the pain and despair that she repressed because, according to her own beliefs, there was nothing to be worried about. She has no more patience, no more official explanations for Kolya’s arrest—only her raw feelings, unbridled from the state.

“Ah, yes, they’d started to let people out, that meant soon Kolya would return, and Alik. Everything would be fine, the way it used to be. Sofia Petrovna caught herself thinking: then Natasha, too, will return. No, Natasha would not return.”

Sofia clings to the hope that everything will return to normal; not knowing anything of Kolya’s status makes it possible to do so. In contrast, no amount of hope will change the fact that Natasha is dead. In a way the fact that Sofia knows Natasha is dead is a blessing; the uncertainty of not knowing whether Kolya is dead or alive—the cycle of false hopes being dashed—is torturous.

“She was happy and excited, she even walked faster. And she wanted to go around telling people all the time: ‘Kolya’s been released. Did you hear? They’ve released Kolya!’ But there was no one to tell.”

Sofia having no one to tell of her fantasy of Kolya’s release is poignant and tragic. Her isolation here is twofold: She’s isolated in her delusion of Kolya’s imminent return and she’s socially alone—the NKVD has made everyone afraid to interact with each other for fear of further persecution. This passage paints a portrait of someone driven into fantasies by a relentless assault on her perception of reality.

“Investigator Ershov beat me and trampled me, and now I’m deaf in one ear. I’ve written many appeals since I’ve been here, but have never received any answer.”

Strikingly, Kolya’s letter is the first piece of evidence that his arrest was unjust. This attests to the success the NKVD had in withholding information about the people they arrested from their relatives. The Kafkaesque silence and newspeak of the Soviet bureaucracy evokes an acute sense of terror. Kolya is utterly helpless to save himself from the cold, indifferent crush of the state.

“‘Do you really think you can write that the investigator beat him? You can’t even think such a thing, let alone write it. They’ve forgotten to deport you, but if you write an appeal—they’ll remember. And they’ll send your son farther away, too…And who brought this letter, anyway? And where are the wit­nesses? …And what proof is there?’…She looked around the bathroom with wild-looking eyes. ‘No, for God’s sake, don’t write anything.’”

This passage reveals the paranoia of living in the panopticon of the NKVD. Mrs. Kiparisova is afraid that her house is bugged—whether it actually is doesn’t matter because the NKVD has succeeded in making itself seem omniscient. Despite her paranoia, Mrs. Kiparisova gives Sofia sober-minded advice; unlike Sofia, who is still relatively naive about what is going on, Mrs. Kiparisova sees clearly that the state will destroy Sofia for accusing it of malfeasance.